Martin Lewis issues urgent message to people worried about DWP PIP benefit ‘changes’

Martin Lewis issues message to people worried about DWP PIP benefit change proposalsThe Martin Lewis Podcast

Transcript

00:00 Nothing has happened. Nothing has happened. This is an early stage consultation green paper.

00:09 These things do not happen quickly. This is a general election year so there's a question

00:14 whether it will happen at all. So for those who were worried about this, and I've had people who

00:19 tell me they've had to increase their medication on the back of it, people who tell me they haven't

00:23 been sleeping on the back of these announcements, I know it's easy for me to say and I know it's

00:28 hard to do, but for the moment my advice if you're worried about it is forget it. This is in the

00:34 political sphere and too often that political spittle travels across and hits people in the

00:40 face. We've had it on student finance for years where the language used in political debate

00:44 actually puts people from non-traditional university backgrounds off going to university

00:49 because it's deliberately being used to ramp up the invective and to ramp up the political distaste

00:54 in the system and that's fine within a political discourse but when it hits into the way that

00:59 people behave practically that's when it becomes a problem and I think the debate this week,

01:04 while it was meant to be constrained within a political sphere in an election year,

01:09 has had a practical impact on some people's mental health and it is very difficult to know

01:15 how to separate the two. So I'm not saying blame that we can't have political discussion,

01:19 that isn't the point I'm making, but I felt that in my position the best thing was to say

01:24 to those people who are panicked about it nothing has happened.